Following established best practices will ensure your emails get to your customers’ inboxes… and it’ll avoid high fines associated with noncompliance.

By maintaining lively dialogue and having engaging content, you can reap the benefits of a $40 return on investment for every dollar spent on email marketing.

It’s as simple as 1, 2, 3

To get the best results, there are three rules of thumb you must follow:

1. People who receive your email must be able to recognize you

Make sure your name, email and physical address are all clearly indicated. Bonus points if you add a phone number and the website where they signed up. Plus, your contacts are much less likely to open emails if they don’t recognize you. The information should be valid for 60 days after the email is sent.

2. You must respect the requests of people who no longer wish to receive your emails must be able to unsubscribe – quickly and painlessly.

The easier you make it to unsubscribe, the less they’ll flag you as spam. People should be able to use the unsubscribe mechanism for 60 days after the email is sent.

3. People who receive your emails specifically asked to receive them, and you can prove you have their permission.

Never buy, steal, rent or borrow a list. Ever. You get the best engagement with people who want your emails – and again, you won’t risk having people flag you as spam. It’s especially important to have current information: lists more than 2 years old should be reconfirmed before receiving any other communication.

It’s the law

These best practices are the requirements for compliance to CASL, the new Canadian anti-spam legislation that will be coming into full force on July 1st, 2014. This law took 10 years to come to where it is, and we expect that it will set the tone for international spam laws in the coming years.

Most email marketing service providers, like CakeMail, have already taken all the steps necessary to ensure you comply with international anti-spam laws. In many cases, they go above and beyond the requirements of the law.

Ultimately, the better your email habits, the better your odds of having your emails get to the inbox.

Good to know:

The responsibility of knowing about anti-spam laws falls on the sender.

In regards to having proof of consent, neither ignorance nor “My dog ate my proof of consent” will be acceptable forms of defence…

As a recipient, you can report SPAM that you believe was sent from a CakeMail client by contacting abuse@cakemail.com

In the coming weeks, we’ll be providing an outline of action items you can take to make sure you follow best practices (and as a result, are compliant to international anti-spam laws). Sign up to get the blog updates to make sure you don’t miss a post.